There are continually increasing number of mobile communication devices in use today, including, for example, smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) with wireless capabilities, personal computers, self-service kiosks and two-way pagers. Accordingly, software applications are being developed to execute on these devices and increase their utility. For example, a smart phone may include an application which retrieves the weather for a range of cities, or a PDA which may include an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. Such software applications take advantage of connectivity to a communication network in order to provide timely and useful services to users of the communication devices.
However, due to limited resources of many devices, as well as the complexity and expense required to deliver large amounts of data to the devices, developing and maintaining software applications tailored for a variety of devices remains a difficult and time-consuming task.
Further, with the proliferation of wireless communication devices, there is an increased demand to quickly and easily develop client applications that support access to one or more backend servers. Therefore, it is often the case that the application is developed independently of the required interface to the backend server.
Accordingly, component applications (also referred to as wireless applications herein) and methods for developing and implementing such applications have been introduced. Details regarding component application can be found in Patent Cooperation Treaty Application Numbers PCT/CA2003/001976 entitled, “System and Method for Building and Execution of Platform-Neutral Generic Services Client Applications” and published as WO2004059938; PCT/CA2003/001980 entitled, “System and Method of Building Wireless Component Applications” and published as WO2004059957; and PCT/CA2003/001981 entitled, “System and Method of Creating and Communicating with Component Based Wireless Applications” and published as WO2004059939, each of which is assigned to the owner of the present application.
In order for a user of a mobile device executing a wireless application to receive data in the form of notifications, the user subscribes to a data source using protocols such as WS-Eventing. Data can then be pushed to the mobile device. However, WS-Eventing is a relatively “chatty” protocol which can consume significant bandwidth for a wireless application.
Accordingly, an improved method for pushing data to a device is desired. Further, a simple method for designing server-side applications to exploit the improved method is also desired.